From The Campus To The Red House

I could say that I’m sharing my desk with Einstein himself this week, nothing more, nothing less. But let’s just say that I made my own version of the famous portrait of Einstein writing on the blackboard. Although he’s plain flat watercolor instead of a relief cut-paper collage, he is officially joining my collection of big-eyed characters.

As you can see, I changed the text a little. Ahem! But that’s because this painting was made to illustrate the first edition of the Outside The Lab newsletter, in which I chat about a political text called Why Socialism that Einstein wrote in 1949. You can read more about this here, if you’re interested.

And here’s my final infographic, with a little shadow added digitally. The reason I made a flat painting instead of a relief collage was mainly to facilitate the scanning process.

Still, since I didn’t use high quality watercolor paper, it wrinkled when it dried. I had to flatten it to be able to scan in properly: I put the painting right side down on my ironing board, added a slightly wet towel on top and ironed it briefly, which did the job.

The scanning step is still a bit of a challenge for me, though, when it comes to color rendering, or dealing with the grain of the paper for example. Does anyone out there have any advice?